Mike McAdam said that the lessons you
learn best are the ones you learn over and over again. More often
than not in this life, I’ve found him to be right.
So I’ve monkeyed around,
periodically, on this scam site called “Classmates.com” over the
last couple or three years---maybe you’ve heard of it. They get you
in touch with your old graduating class, and if you give them money
and let them make you a “Gold Member”, you get to see who’s
visited your profile and you get to communicate directly with these
people---sweet stuff, I guess, if you care enough to throw the dough
their way----my sentiments have always fallen short of a monetary
contribution. Sorry, corporate exploitation….sorry, nostalgia
machine.
I guess that, when I think of my
adolescence, I think of Chelmsford, Massachusetts---my Dad was a
Defense Contractor, and we went from a year abroad to Chelmsford. My
parents had a rocky marriage. In late 1980, they finalized their
divorce and we moved to Nashua, New Hampshire, two months into my
senior year, and I graduated from Nashua High, mostly in a class of
strangers.
I’d like to tell you the
uprooting mattered a lot but I can’t say it did----I was a
miserable, alienated kid, out of step with the out of step---I was
bullied, intimidated and ragged on pretty consistently throughout the
years---not going to bemoan my youth in detail---a lot of people I
knew had it worse, and let’s face it---if we got a brownie point
for our suffering, we might all be lined up around the planet,
waiting for our goddamn Oscar.
I could probably run right up the
cliché generator and characterize my teenage years as ones of quiet
desperation—well, occasionally noisy desperation (hormones are a
wondrous thing), but almost always desperation. Screaming Nerd-core
before nerds took over the world. I couldn’t make it with the in
crowd, I couldn’t make it with the out-crowd. I couldn’t make it.
And when I left the halls of CHS two months into my senior year, I
left like a ghost…I left without a word and it was as if I had
never been there at all.
You could say Chelmsford left its
scars, and you can ask the afformentioned Mr. Mike for verification.
As friends, bandmates and co-conspirators we spent many late nights
talking and driving aimlessly between southern New Hampshire and the
greater Lowell area…there were nights when I’d take the wheel and
he’d implore me, “dude, don’t go to Chelmsford!” Any time we
wound up that way I’d cruise my old, darkened neighborhood and I’d
rant and rave. It was a ghost town, all the kids I’d gone to school
with, my enemies, had grown up and moved away, like I had…but
somewhere in my head, all those ghosts were still walking around.
One of my big writing projects
right now is doing up a screenplay of my first novel…if I were a
Hollywood pitch man I’d tell the execs, “think Holden Caulfield
meets Travis Bickle”---or “think ‘Better off Dead’ meets
‘Taxi Driver’ “. The story isn’t autobiographical, but I
buried a lot of old demons in that piece of work.
Well, okay…mebbe I didn’t bury
them entirely.
I’m not sure what it is about
trying to reconcile yourself with the past that can send you in one
extreme direction or another in an instant….all I know is, it
happens. Not sure what set me off, either. Too much bad water under
the bridge? Too much living out in the wilderness? Too much of my own
trip to allow a sane bit of retrospect?
I had joined some Facebook
Group, CHS Class of 1981. Don’t ask me why…I don’t know why.
I’d like to tell you I’d “reconnected”, but I really
hadn’t…..It was the ultimate Existential Scenario. Maybe some
masochistic part of me wanted it---maybe no part of me wanted it. But
like a moth to the flame….goddammit…..
I found myself on the site a week
or two ago and plans were being made for a class reunion in 2011.
Don’t ask me what Knight Errant in my Id was fired up when I got
myself a gutful and wrote, “If we’re shooting for November 2011,
can we bring our own firearms?”
Well, ha, ha. Mister Irreverent
just couldn’t contain himself. The class of ’81 can blame the
Boomtown Rats (Marilyn Manson wasn’t around at the time) and you
can blame Child Psychology, but then I can blame the Class of ’81
and we can all feel a hell of a lot better.
My illustrious peers were none too
amused.
The site’s administrator, an
old peer I did not know personally, scolded me both publicly and
privately, writing, “ hey C.F- I have to say that referencing
firearms, with in the context of school, doesn't feel comfortable or
funny at all. In fact it scares me, as an administrator in education,
who hears constantly about the truth of rage and homicide in schools.
Please consider the power of your statement. Thanks”
My first, knee-jerk response was
to post, both publicly and privately, “I DID.” And I did,
too….like I’m going to make such a loaded comment without
realizing the ramifications.
At this point it was just pure
confrontation for me. And anyone who knows me knows you don’t get
me started on the subject of school shootings, because I’ve got
very strong opinions on the subject. Kids were going postal long
before Klebold and Harris turned it into a hot, hip, sexy trend, of
course---at one point taping for “Abbey” back circa Columbine, my
bro, Panda said, “when I was a kid, we didn’t go shooting up the
school like they do nowadays…we just thought about it!” That
off-the-cuff statement resonated, hard, with most of the adults I
know. I wasn’t one of the kids who was going to go ballistic and
shoot up my classmates, but I understood those who did. That was why,
as a teen, I identified so strongly with movies like
“Carrie”---someone had put on celluloid the gut-level wishes a
lot of us alien youth were feeling. They tapped into a zeitgeist
that a lot of people may not have been comfortable with…there it
was, though---the sentiments were halfway socially acceptable because
it hid behind the monicker of “horror”.
So, is this a taboo on the new
frontier? I’m hard-pressed to give a shit, personally. On my own
level, me and mine have done our damndest to improve things. We beat
everyone to the punch with the “it gets better” trip by roughly a
decade---at one point Shannon & I did our dead best to talk a kid
down when we thought he might want to pull a Columbine. So, contrary
to what some mental tubeworms want to say, I’ve never been “part
of the problem”.
My friend on the website, though?
SHEESH. “As an administrator in education, who hears constantly
about the truth of rage and homicide in schools”?! She shows so
much knowledge on the subject one might only surmise she’s read
about it in the paper once or twice. And it scares her. Well, that
she’s an administrator in education scares ME, and it makes me
wonder if she could ever possibly help the situation, as alien as it
obviously is to her. You could say I found a “teaching moment” in
there, though, and tried to put some of this forth. By all means,
open yourself up to the truth of rage, instead of just "hearing
about" it. As an administrator, the "Truth" you hear
might save your life....as well as those of others. She never
responded and I would guess that it was a wasted effort…but most of
my efforts back then were.
I needed to stay the hell away for
a few days and clear my head. Shit like that always impacts me and I
need to distance myself from it. Several days thereafter I returned
to my class’s site…not only had the thread I had caused so much
trouble on been removed----everything I’d ever posted there had
been removed.
HUH. Well, to quote Groucho, I
wouldn’t ever wanna be part of a club that would have someone like
me for a member….rejection was a constant to me as a kid; As a
writer I’ve pretty much claimed it as a big part of my life. So,
plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose.
I went to a bad place mentally
and emotionally…but that’s all excusable….because I went to a
bad place called Chelmsford, Massachusetts.
The next day I was driving
downtown with Heather, She asked me if anything was happening online.
So I had to finally work up the nerve and tell her what went
down…”you remember that whole business with my graduating class?
Well, I think I got banned from the site!”
Sometimes a good wife can just do
one little thing in an abysmal situation and fix everything, and no
one’s better than she is.
She laughed and fist bumped me.
Life was good again.
Copyright 2011, 2015 C.F. Roberts/Molotov Editions
THIS WEEK'S PLAYLIST:
Blue Oyster Cult-Tyranny and Mutation
Serge Gainsbourg-L'Histoire de Melody Nelson
The Flaming Lips-Transmissions from the Satellite Heart
